I've been cloning my systems for long years since, the dd in/out cloning itself is possible, sure.
But I was wondering what should I prepare to get the system working on the new hardware, with all the programs that I conf'ed in years?
My current system, the output of
# lshw -short
follows.

The system onto which I would like to clone some, probably the most recent, of my images of the /root of the current system (/usr and /var there too), and /boot (separate)...
The system I would like to clone a recent image of my old system onto is still in the store, but I plan, most certainly on amd64 (couldn't clone anything on different arch, I believe), probably the am3 socket (some of the reasons I read from user wrc1944 here:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-938520-start-0.html
and it might be buying something to the likes of these:
http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970%20Pro3/http://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/970%20Extreme3/
along with maybe some Phonem CPU, DDR3 that fits and graphics card that fits...
Whichever the new setup will be, the question remains, how to prepare my old system so that it can be cloned on to the new hardware?
I guess I'll first go and get a genkernel first time ever I believe (always compiled my own kernels for years), so the drivers would be ready and willing to recognize the new hardware upon cloning...
Or could I just revamp my hardened kernel in view of the new hardware?

Code:

# uname -r
3.6.3-hardened-121027_1100
#

But are there, there must be other issues to take a closer view at in my preparations...
Which ones?
Thankx for any suggestions.
OTOH, if I make it, I'll give a report back onto here, for other potential Gentoo users!
As well, if anyone from among newer users need a suggestion on cloning which I do on my system (conditional on it being same hardware models, basically same MBO, same/similar HDD setup on two or more different systems), I will gladly relate to you my experience, just voice your need!

Last edited by miroR on Sun Oct 28, 2012 8:42 pm; edited 1 time in total

Cloning via dd is wasteful, and in the case of SSDs, actively harmful. You should instead make new partitions on the new drive and copy the files over via the filesystem interface. This will preserve all your customization, get you the latest filesystem features, and take less time to copy.

For preparation, you can try to reuse your kernel or just build a kernel which supports both the old and new hardware. Genkernel may make this easier, but you can still do it by hand if you prefer.

Cloning via dd is wasteful, and in the case of SSDs, actively harmful. You should instead make new partitions on the new drive and copy the files over via the filesystem interface. This will preserve all your customization, get you the latest filesystem features, and take less time to copy.

It's not SSD's (the HDD's I gave above are already part of the future setup as they are of the current one, forgot to say that; all the other main hardware, will be new).
So, I won't be using SSD's and, though I admit dd'ing might take longer (not always though) than, say rsync'ing the files (the only way from among the filesystem ways which I regard as safe and as little prone to errors as dd'ing, IMO) , and dd'ing is so clean, and I do prefer it when simplicity and completeness is more important than an hour or so too long time to perform.
I can tell that, wait, I'll look it up now, this program:
http://www.fsarchiver.org/Main_Page
didn't always clone well my systems at different times and computers which I was trying it at..
I have been cloning, same MBO's, same software raid5/raid6, plain, partitoins, three to four systems, for long years.
dd'ing has proven to me to be very reliable!
Also this is what I anyway do when dd'ing:

Hu wrote:

You should instead make new partitions on the new drive

It's just that I dd those partitions (but I could also rsync them, sure). I don't dd the entire drives. I dd the partitions (raid5/raid6 or plain).
What brought you to conclusion that dd'ing is wasteful and even.harmful, although I won't be needing it, not yet, just curious, in case of SSD's?

Hu wrote:

For preparation, you can try to reuse your kernel or just build a kernel which supports both the old and new hardware. Genkernel may make this easier, but you can still do it by hand if you prefer.

Yeah. I thought so.. So thanks for confirming what I supposed to be the case.
This part is more important...
The above point of contention is not, apart from a little curiosity.

Thanx, Hu!

Anyone else cloned (or rsynced, or plain cp'ed the filesystems of /root /usr /var /boot or what they had, onto new hardware similar to what I would like to do?

If anyone did, which problems did you encounter? Or did it just work? After which preparations, other than, sure, the drivers for the new hardware...

It's not SSD's (the HDD's I gave above are already part of the future setup as they are of the current one, forgot to say that; all the other main hardware, will be new).

I understood, but I wanted to point that this is bad practice.

miroR wrote:

What brought you to conclusion that dd'ing is wasteful and even.harmful, although I won't be needing it, not yet, just curious, in case of SSD's?

Quality SSDs know which parts of the drive have been written and which are free, then skip migrating data when a free section is first written. If you use dd, you write to the entire partition, so none of it is considered free by the SSD.

Thanks, Hu.
Amyway, I'll report back how it went once I clone it.
Once I buy it...
So first, making the choice on the MBO, processor, DDR3 and graphics card.
Little in he way of certainty on a good choice (I don't follow trends)...
I mean, in the hope that others may benefit from my choice, I'll post my selection candidates here. I hope it's within the topic.
(I noticed, alas, too late only, there is also:
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewforum-f-46.html
maybe this part fits there better... but not sure about that either)

The note on processor I would like to get me.
I would prefer the "Energy Efficient" labeled one, but I'm afraid there aren't any to buy in Croatia...
Just as there are so few Phenom X6 at all... People getting really poor... I myself am spending the rest of my parents inheritance (after the neocommunist regime of Croatia ruined the rest of my chances for sustained non-profit activism in my own care for my country and my nation, through rigged judicial persecution)...

So the above question is really, which is of those X4 is the best fit (because X6 are not an option, and X2 is too little).

I'll go and study and search the net for more understanding, more reviews, and then I'm back.

I would go with 850 and run it at 3.2Ghz instead of 3.3. I like a cool running system. Otherwise the 975. I don't care for odd clock rates and prefer multiples of 200Mhz for RAM synchronization. YMMV.

Personally, I'm running a 1090T with the ondemand driver. It mostly runs at 800Mhz and switches quickly and smoothly if say I am doing a build. The Linux Cool n' Quiet driver works so much better than the Windoze XP driver. But you knew that.

A quick check for the 1090T shows it out of stock or unavailable at my favorite vendors. Might be available on eBay. I paid $174.99 last May.

I found the 955 and 965 still fopr sale. I'd go with the 3.4GHz for $5 more, even if money is tight. I might just buy one to replace an X3 while this socket is still avilable.

That line, only at 3.2GHz. I see.
An idea worth considering! But, not available in Croatia.

Tony0945 wrote:

I like a cool running system. Otherwise the 975. I don't care for odd clock rates and prefer multiples of 200Mhz for RAM synchronization. YMMV.

I see. So:

Code:

975* 3.6 GHz 2MB 6MB socket AM3 125W 45nm SOI

But, again, no 975 Phenoms either available in Croatia at this time.

Tony0945 wrote:

Personally, I'm running a 1090T with the ondemand driver. It mostly runs at 800Mhz and switches quickly and smoothly if say I am doing a build. The Linux Cool n' Quiet driver works so much better than the Windoze XP driver. But you knew that.

A quick check for the 1090T shows it out of stock or unavailable at my favorite vendors. Might be available on eBay. I paid $174.99 last May.

I found the 955 and 965 still fopr sale. I'd go with the 3.4GHz for $5 more, even if money is tight. I might just buy one to replace an X3 while this socket is still avilable.

Thanks!
Really appreciate your advice.
No e-bay, meagre and thin here. Soon to be going hungry... Joking, maybe. Maybe not...
No way though could I afford $174 for just the CPU. Truly, I could if I went for one computer only, but I like having them do their own tasks each (like often two, even three TV-cards --old TV cards, but maintained, that is: cooled, well-- are in use, each in their own system...)
And I like cloning them. That's such useful thing! Such a time saver!
So 1090T or any of the X6 is not an option.

I'm afraid I'll have to live with the odd clock rates of 955 or 965.
And for sale there are here in Croatia. That's South-East of Europe, on the other, more beautiful coast of the Adriatic sea than Italy.

And, the market is so strange here. Even the market feels of corporate bullying and the dominant SuperPower which is your country, that is not leading the world well. Someone has to lead, and most people round the world still respect and feel for your country (IIUC), but, to lead well, and for the good of all is the only right way to lead... And the US is not behaving and leading for the good of all.

But I was saying, the market is so strange here. Never you know what'll be left for us to buy, and what will be lacking...

If you're getting one of the newer Phenoms with the automatic turbo mode, don't bother comparing by the turbo speed numbers; they don't run at top speed unless you're doing heavily single-threaded loads.

I bought a 2.8GHz X3 720BE and got the 4th core for free with a BIOS upgrade. It's been running almost completely stable like that for over 3 years now, only gave me problems when I ran it overclocked with foldingathome for 2 weeks straight.

The night grew dark and deep in the meantime, in Europe. Mornin'! I'm back.

Ant P. wrote:

If you're getting one of the newer Phenoms with the automatic turbo mode, don't bother comparing by the turbo speed numbers; they don't run at top speed unless you're doing heavily single-threaded loads.

When overclocking, some AMD CPU models may not support DDR3 1600 MHz or higher frequency DIMMs

and above and below that line.
That sure in on memory (so I did get it vaguely really , even though it is interrelated with proc speed...). OTOH, not much choice in this province of the Corporate & Soviet EU, so I'll go for the available 965/955 Phenom where I buy the rest of the stuff...

Works fine. Passed memtest86 on a Gentoo install CD with flying
colors at 1333mhz. memtest86 showed it was running in dual-channel
mode (interface to memory was 128-bit). I downclocked it to 1066mhz
in BIOS (see the Phenom II speeds in the AMD guide at the URL
above) to keep the cpu under warranty..

I expect that the Corsair Vengeance 1600mhz will be fine with any
of those motherboards. (Asrock has a qualified memory list linked
to their product pages for the different motherboard models.)

The Phenom II is an AMD K10 cpu. The Athlon X2 is K8. The standard
kernel (through 3.3.8 ) seems to class them both together for CFLAGS,
but for userspace "-march=native" will likely take advantage of extra
features available on the K10 architecture.

Your southbridge will be different, so you will want to adjust kernel
drivers (enable ahci support, no need for a separate codec driver
for hda intel sound, etc). The tg3 network driver for the Broadcom
ethernet chip on the Asrock motherboards works fine.

Asus has better documentation and more extensive, more
intelligible BIOS options, but they do not always work better.

(Like in BIOS Setup on the Extreme4, the options for "CPU overclock"
are "Manual Mode" and "Overclock." ??? Are not these the same
thing? Where is the "auto" option, which would mean "choose
the fastest stable clocking", and the "disable" option, which
would mean "do not overclock; use the AMD factory spec
clocking for this cpu"? It turns out that you want "manual mode"
if you do *not* want to overclock it, perhaps because you want
the cpu to stay under warranty for the whole 3 year warranty
period. The "overclock" option enables a step function overclocking
in "% of spec" steps.)

The Asus BIOS makes it far easier to understand what the various
options do exactly than this, but OTOH I tried this same cpu and
ram in an Asus M5A97 that I had to RMA for various issues that
made it unusable. I did not need to RMA the Extreme4, so far it
continues to work.

The AMD-supplied cpu cooler works fine in the cpu cooler framework
around the cpu socket on the 990FX Extreme4. I would suggest
cleaning the little pad of heat sink compound off of the cooler that
comes with a boxed AMD cpu and use your own heat sink compound
(so you do not find the cpu and heat sink glued together by the
heat sink compound when you go to pull the cpu and heat sink
and move them to a different motherboard).
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/What-is-the-Best-Way-to-Apply-Thermal-Grease-Part-1/1303/3

edit:
To answer the original question, your old userspace will probably run
on the new cpu, but you'll want to re-emerge it to get best performance.
For the kernels, K8 kernels will probably boot on it, but the old kernels
will lack drivers for some of the new hardware. I would tend to do
the system cloning at filesystem level so I do not need to care
about differences in the old and new storage hardware, once the storage
is partitioned and formatted with filesystems._________________TIA

Last edited by wcg on Wed Oct 31, 2012 12:28 pm; edited 1 time in total

...[temporarily snipped]...
The AMD-supplied cpu cooler works fine in the cpu cooler framework
around the cpu socket on the 990FX Extreme4. I would suggest
cleaning the little pad of heat sink compound off of the cooler that
comes with a boxed AMD cpu and use your own heat sink compound
(so you do not find the cpu and heat sink glued together by the
heat sink compound when you go to pull the cpu and heat sink
and move them to a different motherboard).
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/What-is-the-Best-Way-to-Apply-Thermal-Grease-Part-1/1303/3
...[temporarily snipped]...

The reason I snipped those, is I have to postpone, as they require hours of study for me to understand and use your experience and advice to my best. Limited user capabilities and understanding here.
OTOH, that is what the seller in store didn't make clear (he did suggest that I buy the silver compound, but I didn't figure out it was a hint in that direction), and your advice is late for first installation.
I mean, the system works, I just built it (incompletely, but I built it), and I'm in the BIOS.
So at the time, I can only thank you for fine obviously expert advice.
And I have some more building (there're future clones, probably two, to be built as well, with same model hardware)...
First I needed to get the system together.
Unfortunately, or maybe not, I already bought a pair, 2x4G of Kingston that I linked to above.
But I can regard it as lost investment (it is modest loss), or swap them, and go for the Corsair, if there is strong advantage in performance with Corsair in comparison to the Kingston?
Is it?
The other issues, I don't fully understand, and have to build the system first.
I thank you, and will look up in intervals of hours for your possible answer on whether Corsair is much better choice than Kingston.
Thank you, wcg!

...[snip]...
To answer the original question, your old userspace will probably run
on the new cpu, but you'll want to re-emerge it to get best performance.
For the kernels, K8 kernels will probably boot on it, but the old kernels
will lack drivers for some of the new hardware. I would tend to do
the system cloning at filesystem level so I do not need to care
about differences in the old and new storage hardware, once the storage
is partitioned and formatted with filesystems.

Edit, start.
Sorry for inconsistent reply. Really tired, and with my mind in the building of the hardware, not yet in the kernel.
On the storage level, no difference. HDD is already part of the new setup, and the only same item in the old and the new. Because I did my cloning from the old RAID on 6-7 ys old Seagate/Western Digital HDDs before this transition onto new MBO/CPU. I did that cloning on filesystem level, true, I rsynced since that is the most advanced way, I believe.
Edit, end.
Since I hope this could also be a thread useful for other GNU Gentoo users, esp. the even less experienced than me, I logged in, maybe last time tonight (a province of Corporate and Soviet EU is where I live. night here), and this time from my new setup.
I'm on sysresccd from USB stick, it workd just fine.
We, I could bet, will witness what only GNU Gentoo can do, and that is, I have the same GNU Gentoo Linux installation since 2008, plus regular and sometimes less regular updates, of course.
I could bet, will witness that my 2008 system installed on old AMD64 hardware will, with little configuration work, a little reemerging by portage, run just perfectly on my new system.
Sure, I will have to take more time, since I am just intermediate in my abilities here.
So, this is now, fro, lve sysresccd (http://www.sysresccd.org/) the output of
# lshw -short

Cheers!
Edit start.
There is no RAID here. That is not the aim. This is not my complete system setup.
Also, for reasons that wcg suggested in his post above, I'll even yet take the CPU out and line it properly with silver compound... And there'll be RAID of three HDD's like that one...
Good night (I guess...)
Edit end.

[dram manufacturer]
The Kingston DDR-3 may work fine. I first ordered the Corsair Vengeance
1866mhz because it was on the Asus M5A97 approved list, the manufacturer
has a good reputation for quality control, and the price was not unreasonable
compared to other brands also on the Asus approved list for that motherboard.

The 1866mhz rating allows some headroom to run it faster with
newer cpus (or with the Phenom II overclocked) if there is ever
a need for that.

As it turns out, it works fine on the Asrock 990FX Extreme4, too.

[heatsink compound]
I first installed the cpu on the M5A97, using the AMD heatsink and fan
that came with the cpu. The AMD heatsink for the Phenom II came with
a pad of heatsink compound pre-applied to the bottom of the heatsink.
I used that.

The motherboard had defects. After half a day, I needed to pull
the heatsink and cpu so that I could return the motherboard and
get a different one. I loosened the clips, pulled on the heatsink,
and the cpu came out of the cpu socket without opening it first
(a ZIF socket, with the little swing arm on the side to clamp and unclamp
the cpu pins in the socket).

The cpu and heatsink were glued together by the original heat sink
compound. I could not leave them that way, because there would not
be clearance for the swing arm on the side of the cpu ZIF socket
on a new motherboard.

The solution was to heat them up to loosen the original AMD heatsink
compound, but not enough to damage the cpu (setting them on
a stove or hot plate burner would be unsafe, for example). The AMD
heat sink has a copper bar on the bottom of it that directly contacts
the top of the cpu and that sticks out past the edges of the cpu when
installed. I used a heat gun (like a handheld hair dryer but gets hotter
faster) and heated up that copper bar on the bottom of the heatsink
enough to loosen the original heatsink compound, which allowed me
to separate the cpu and heatsink. I cleaned the original heatsink
compound off of the cpu and heatsink with electrical contact cleaner
(evaporates really quickly, leaves no film on the surface) and a
soft cloth.

I used a pea-sized dab of this stuff when I reinstalled
the cpu and heatsink in a new motherboard:
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=AS-CMQ2-27G
(There may be heatsink compounds available with higher thermal
conductivity than that one, but that compound is non-conductive,
so it cannot short anything out even if some drips onto
the motherboard unnoticed, and the price was reasonable.)

To summarize:

I do not think you necessarily need to exchange the Kingston
dram for the Corsair dram (I have had many Kingston simms
and dimms on many different motherboards, and I have never
had one fail before it became obsolete). I simply have personal
experience with Corsair Vengeance DDR-3 dimms on that motherboard,
and they work without problems. The heatsinks on the dimms are not
a problem when inserting or removing the dimms from their sockets.

The AMD-supplied heatsink compound probably works ok as far as
maintaining good thermal conduction between the cpu and heatsink.
It is simply unnecessarily annoying if you need to pull the cpu and
move it to a different motherboard. Users who have a new AMD cpu
and heatsink can preempt that problem by removing the supplied heatsink
compound from the heatsink and replacing it with their own choice
of heatsink compound when installing the cpu and cpu cooler
for the first time.

It seems as though you have the system cloning well in hand.
If kernels compiled with K8 compiler flags will run on K10 cpus,
then userspace (glibc, bash, gcc, xorg, and so on) compiled
with K8 compiler flags will run on those cpus, too. (You can
update userspace to K10 compiler flags for better performance
at your leisure.)_________________TIA

If kernels compiled with K8 compiler flags will run on K10 cpus,
then userspace (glibc, bash, gcc, xorg, and so on) compiled
with K8 compiler flags will run on those cpus, too. (You can
update userspace to K10 compiler flags for better performance
at your leisure.)
...[snip]...

Right! The system just worked as it was, as it was installed previously on the old hardeware...

Code:

# uname -r
3.6.3-hardened-121031_1100
#

The 121031_1100 stands for local version of `date +%y%m%d_%H`
Small things were a matter of fixing at first. Such as,

in the old .config:

Code:

CONFIG_NR_CPUS=2

needed be set to 4, and such other small issues were, and still are there.

Before I go and fix one more urgent issue, I would like to give a link on these forums to possible newbies reading this, where I explain how I dd backup my system (which same image can be used for restoring the system, as well as for cloning the system onto another box):

Now, for even newbies, I believe that my following statement will be understandable.

I have already perfectly successfully cloned onto one of the other boxes, the most freshly emerge-updated of the systems.

dd image making/restoring/cloning (where applicable, such as old fashioned HDD, not SSD), is a marvel!

Sure, changes particular to the original system, such as settings in the /etc/hosts /etc/fstab, /etc/conf.d/net and the like, do need to be taken from the old, say backed up /etc.

It is also useful for the saving of bandwith to the servers. More than one system, only one rsync'ing for all the other systems!

These are the beauties that I don't think all OS's can offer you. That's GNU Gentoo linux which I like!

I can't get into too many details on any other matters touched in this thread because of one particular issue, that is broader, possibly, actually which doesn't anymore belong here, and which is urgent...

And for that issue, I have to do some more searching and testing and possibly ask for help on ffmpeg or mencoder mailing lists.

The problem is, if I don't make it in time (only a few hours left for me to catch replays), I'll have lost an important show or twh that audience in Croatia are waiting for me to put on my Youtube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/miroR2 -- search for ENGLISH to find a few of my works for intl audience) (and which I have permit for).

I promise I'll try and come back and reply to the remaining issues, and give a final report, because I believe in GNU Linux, as community, and like if I can give a little back for all that I received!

In effect, this is what I would get with the new:
linux-3.6.4-hardened
kernel (was there for less than a day, already 3.6..5 is out). I would get:

Code:

PANIC: early exception 08 rip 246:10 error 815e6e31 cr2 0

or;

Code:

PANIC: early exception 0f rip 10:ffffffff815e6e31 error 0 cr2 0

and those lines are manually copied over since they sure mean NO BOOT...
Let's see if it's the kernel's fault or if I have badder issue at hand... (I mean I sure am compiling the new kernel.)
And than I back the system up and do as Tony0945 kindly advised me to do!

But I haven't compiled USB3 support in the kernel yet. I think it's this that I'm selecting:

Code:

│ <*> xHCI HCD (USB 3.0) support (EXPERIMENTAL)

wcg wrote:

The Phenom II is an AMD K10 cpu. The Athlon X2 is K8. The standard
kernel (through 3.3.8 ) seems to class them both together for CFLAGS,
but for userspace "-march=native" will likely take advantage of extra
features available on the K10 architecture.

Like how? In the /etc/make.conf (BTW, I tried to move to new standard and moved that file to /etc/portage/make.conf, along with moving /etc/make.profile/ to /etc/portage/make.profile, but it wouldn't work, like dispatch-conf or etc-update worked on those in /etc only) I currently have:

Code:

CFLAGS="-march=k8 -O2 -pipe"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"
# This should not be changed unless you know exactly what you are doing. You
# should probably be using a different stage, instead.
CHOST="x86_64-pc-linux-gnu"

So should I change the first line to:

Code:

CFLAGS="-march=native -O2 -pipe"

wcg wrote:

Your southbridge will be different, so you will want to adjust kernel drivers (enable ahci support...

I got, in Serial ATA and Parallel ATA drivers:

Code:

<*> AHCI SATA support

and I now understand that the sata controler is the southbridge' affair.

I got that, and it's really complete, from plain (no "-v") lspci, with this command that ruled out the TV card chip (Conexant), the Marvell chip which is on small PCI-e board, the VIA VT6315 Firewire Controller, the RTL Ethernet chipset and the Turks Sapphire card, and its chip RD890, and the Intel HDA audio, with this command line:

Actually I don't find much, and I can't see what else I might be missing:

Code:

# pwd
/usr/src/linux
#

Searches like this one:

Code:

grep -ri SB9 ./ | grep -vi USB | grep -vi PSB

don't return anything related.
And I searched too much to little avail.
Sure, because I forgot that lshw gives the other view than lspci on those.
Rereading previous posts, the those SB and NB (no "nb" there, but the "bridge Family 10h Processor" lines) is visibe above in my post from:
Tue Oct 30, 2012 12:31 am.
I don't know what else I might be missing. Btwn the old and the now compiling version only USB3 driver (if my guess is correct, which it probably is), is different:

Regarding some of the other advice, which is all clearer now that I'm getting familiar with the new hardware, I might only be using it when over or underclocking and tweaking DRAM. I wish this hardware would last me like the old one, for several years.
I'll be back to report how it went. Allow more time pls.

I recall changing form k8 to k10. That was from an Athlon II X2 (Newcastle?) to Phenom II X6 (Deneb). I used the emerge -ea world. Don't recall any problems, but it took a long time with nearly a thousand packages installed.

Another time I changed from i686 to K6. In that case I had a lot of crashes because the K6 doesn't run all i686 opcodes. Booting an old system rescue CD (i386 or i486, I don't remember which) and using distcc helped.